Archive for July, 2010|Monthly archive page

Maybe 40 or 50 pounds
I met a friend for coffee last week who I hadn’t seen since before Christmas. Her first words as she caught sight of me were “Oh my GOD!!! You’ve lost SO MUCH WEIGHT!!” Her face was incredulous. Then she said “Oh my GOD!! You’ve lost SO MUCH WEIGHT!!!” After that she started repeating herself. It was a very gratifying MRM (Mardy Roux Moment). After months of people who see me often being slightly more lackadaisical about my weight, it felt good to get some enthusiastic feedback. My friend asked me again and again “How much have you lost?” to which I could only reply “I don’t know”, because, as you know if you’ve been following the Mardy Roux Obesity Treatment Project, I insist on neither weighing nor measuring myself. What I was able to say was that I did fit into an old pair of jeans a few weeks back that I feel quite certain I used to wear when I was maybe 40 or 50 pounds lighter than I was at my last known weight. So maybe 40 or 50 pounds I suppose. Maybe more, maybe less. What’s important is that I am not as fat as I was only six months ago, and I haven’t really had to struggle at all to lose the fat!

Is that ME?
Now when I catch sight of myself in a shop window, which for so many years was my only (and always accidental) sight of my own full length reflection, I can see for myself that I am simply not as wide as I was before. Sometimes I have trouble believing it’s me. I don’t believe my face has changed very dramatically yet, but my investigations of incremental weight loss in older women who are losing over a hundred pounds has shown me that the major changes, the ones where people they know well don’t even recognize them on the street, seem to come in the last stages of weight loss. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my “old self” in the bathroom mirror, the face I knew before I became fat. She’s a girl I thought I would never ever see again, but she’s making fleeting visits to me nowadays. For now, I am still comfortably recognizable to my friends, if thinner than I was. I am still obese for sure, but as my tummy fat starts to melt away (oh yes, we’ll be adding in elements in future phases for dealing with that tummy fat, but in Phase 1 you don’t need to worry about it at all, just know that you’re on the right road and relax) I know I’ll be able to see dramatic changes.

My weight loss has been most noticeable in every part of my body except my tummy, which still insists on bulging out past my boobs. Sometimes I‘ve felt like no matter how much smaller I eventually get, if that tummy doesn’t shrink away I’ll always look overweight. Now, finally, I am starting to get the tummy to go down in size, slowly, almost imperceptibly, but still surely. Yes, I still have my “pooch”, but I’m working on it. It’s not the pooch it used to be. In Phase 2 I’ll explain the first set of specific instructions for making sure you’re working on your pooch while you get the rest of your weight down as well. And there’ll be more to come in subsequent phases as well. Not too much at once.

It took a quite a long while for me to understand that my boobs were actually shrinking. Hell, don’t you love it when your boobs shrink and your tummy stays the way it was! Way to feel like a fatso! I have yet to buy new bras, but I’m on the cusp of that drastic action. My bras are getting very puckery at the top, and I reckon I could fit twice as much boob in them as I have now. When I put them on, I KNOW I’m quite bit smaller than I was. Still, I’m hanging in there, so to speak, until I feel like I absolutely MUST get new ones. Which will be soon.

It’s a waist!
I recall in the early days back in January, when I was first looking to see if my weight had gone down, that I would stand sideways in front of the mirror and pull my tummy in and there was no visible IMPACT of my tummy profile changing. Pulling my tummy in as hard as I could made no change to my profile. Zero. It was very disheartening to say the least. Today, when I pull my tummy in, I almost look like a normal “overweight but not obese” person. And my waist goes way in, so that I can see that I HAVE a waist. Now THAT’S a change. I was MORBIDLY OBESE in JANUARY…six months ago! Today I can see my WAIST emerging!

A few days ago I met a dear friend for coffee, someone who had seen me only a few weeks earlier. Only this time, instead of wearing my usual baggy fat clothes, I wore those jeans I now fit into. She greeted me in front of Starbuck’s with cries of “You skinny Minnie…you skinny Minnie!” (she’s a bit of a character). Now, I KNOW I am not skinny. I am obese. But it really is very comforting to hear some outside verification that what I am doing is having an impact on how I look.

A couple of weeks ago some of my friends started nagging me that I need to get some new clothes because my ordinary clothes are so baggy on me. I am refusing for the moment because clothes shopping is still a dreaded ordeal, and I know that when I get the time and inclination to search through my old clothes, I’ll find a few things that I wore when my weight was on the way up. My work trousers are now so baggy around the waist that I have to wear a belt…A BELT!!!…to hold them up! And if I wriggle a bit I don’t have to undo the button and zip to go to the washroom! Honestly, the things that can amuse a menopausal obese person are almost endless.

Make sure you read the Phase 1 instructions
So, what have I been doing to achieve this lovely, gentle, ongoing reduction in size? Well, make sure you read all the Phase 1 instructions and the MROTP rules if you haven’t already. I rested instead of exercising (I am working on a post about exercise and my approach and how it will eventually fit into the plan much later on). I ate whatever I liked four days a week in Phase 1. I followed the instructions for the liquid fast the other three days. Phase 2 is not going to be dramatically different, but it is a change. Phase 3 will be another slight change, until around Phase 4 & 5 we’ll start moving into something different altogether from the early phases.

My skin is coming back to life!
I must also comment that I can’t even begin to comprehend how good my skin is looking these days. I really am like a person who is gradually coming back to wellness after years and years of having some dreadful disease. Today, with my latest adaptations to the program, I had to go and look at my face TWICE in the mirror. My skin is much tighter…let me say THAT again…MUCH TIGHTER than it was six months back. My face has a kind of internal radiance and the skin is clear and healthy-looking. My cheeks, that have been rather sallow for years, now have a natural blush, and the rosacea I’ve suffered from for years is as good as gone….something I surely didn’t suspect. And now, my pores are looking smaller and my overall skin texture is getting finer. As I stood in front of the mirror earlier today I thought to myself that had I been paying for a skin treatment that had given me these results I would be really happy!

I will admit that I feel that under my eyes still seems a touch hollow and needs brightening, but I am not concerned about that. I see improvement all the time. Six months ago I couldn’t see the hollowness there because it was masked by puffiness caused by my being a state of inflammation. The puffiness is now well and truly gone, and I am undergoing a healing process. My obesity was a sign that my body was starving itself to death by withholding energy and nutrients from me, locked away in fat cells. That slight hollowness under the eyes is the last remnant of the “me” that was slowly starving to death in a body that was becoming increasingly entombed in fat. Now, my eyes look better and better all the time. The dark circles are disappearing and are almost gone. I am now in recuperation mode.

I am coming back to life!
In terms of the healing process, it’s critical to understand that when you have gained so much weight as to become obese, or even morbidly obese as I had become, you also are probably not a well person. My Mardy Roux Obesity Treatment Project has been about not just losing the weight, but also about treating the underlying conditions that contributed to the obesity and that may have resulted from it. As my friend said to me last week…”You used to always look SO TIRED before…now you look alive and vibrant and energetic!” And that alive, vibrant, energetic person, I believe, is the person I am finding who has been locked within this terrible unwellness called obesity.

Mardy Roux

If you are reading this post and wish to know more about Phase 1 of the MROTP, then please be sure to read the MROTP rules and the instructions for Phase 1 which you will find here on this blog.